Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 Trailer Analysis

About a week ago, Bandi Namco announced the sequel to the 2015 game Dragon Ball Xenoverse. All that was released was a single trailer, with more details to be revealed at E3, but a lot can actually be inferred from that trailer alone.

For those that aren't familiar with the game, Dragon Ball Xenoverse was an Action RPG that launched in February 2015. It sold very well despite some issues with the game design itself. The biggest draw to the game was the ability to create your own character and place them in the Dragon Ball universe. The character creator was simple, and left much to be desired, but it was a strong base and it allowed for a lot of people to live out their fantasies of experiencing Dragon Ball first hand.

Now lets' take a look at the trailer.

The first thing that stands out to me is the hub world. It's not only much larger, but it's now primarily in a mountainous region, and it appears to be all in one zone. You also now have the ability to fly in the overworld, which is an enormous improvement. In the previous game, you had to run everywhere at a fairly slow pace, and the entire hub was broken into 3 instances, which made it less convenient overall. So already we're seeing improvements.

The next tidbit that I didn't catch at first was the fact that in the center of the hub world, there is a podium featuring a hologram of the protagonist of the first game's trailer. Coupled with the fact that this new trailer follows a different character entirely, this seems to imply that there won't be a full-on character transfer system but a reference system, something that reads save data from the first Xenoverse game and displays your primary character from that game in Xenoverse 2. This might be a disappointment to some fans, and understandably so, but if push comes to shove, they can always recreate their old character.

The trailer goes on to show various villains who were not present in the first Xenoverse game, including Frieza's lackeys, Zarbon and Dedoria, as well as movie villains Turles and Lord Slug. Afterward, it shows shots of Frieza, Gohan fighting Cell, and Goku using the spirit bomb on Kid Buu (presumably). This implies that Xenoverse 2 will feature many of the skipped scenes from the first game, as well as many of the movies that it did not cover. Dragon Ball Xenoverse actually skipped a fair amount of content in its retelling of Dragon Ball; there was no second or third stage form of Frieza, and Cell only had his perfect form. Between the new characters as well as the old scenes shown in this trailer, I would say it is safe to assume that this will be a retelling of ALL of Dragon Ball Z, if not the majority, including moments from the first game.

The first Dragon Ball Xenoverse game cut a lot of corners when it came to retelling the story—forms of villains were skipped, chunks of the story were never told, the Android Saga was skipped entirely! This already is lining up to be an impressive amount of content if they're planning on doing the story again, with parts they skipped and the movies.

The last part of the trailer that's worth talking about is a single line that actually raises a lot of questions. In the trailer, it shows a scene from History of Trunks, the part where Trunks discovers Gohan's dead body and bursts into tears and rage. Following this scene, the trailer shows:

That's a very strange line isn't it? In the first game, you were fighting to keep the timeline the same, could it be in this game you're trying to change it? The trailer does say that you're fighting to "protect the history of Dragon Ball" but maybe that isn't as black and white as it sounds. Could this mean that we can change history and get alternate endings? Are we playing as the antagonist this time around? We can only speculate right now.

I'm personally ecstatic for Xenoverse 2, but what do you think about the upcoming game? Do you have any changes you really want Xenoverse 2 to make from the last game?  Feel free to leave your thoughts in a comment below!